Looking Again is as much about photography as it is about the specific photographs reproduced within it. It is designed to provide the reader with a glimpse into both the collection at the New Orleans Museum of Art and into photography’s complexity. Through 131 objects and essays, Russell Lord explores the many histories of photography, addressing long-held beliefs and offering new ways of thinking about, and looking at, photographs. As the world moves increasingly toward an image-dependent style of communication, there has never been a better time to seriously examine our belief in or apprehension toward the photographic image. Standing on the threshold of what might be a turning point in humanity’s relationship to the photograph, this volume encourages the reader to dig deeply into photography: to look, and then look again.

Russell Lord is the Freeman Family Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He previously held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. His deepest area of expertise is the origins of photography, but he has written and lectured widely on almost every moment in the history of photography. Lord’s recent publications include Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument (2013), and contributions to Photorealism: Beginnings to Today (2014) and East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography (2017). His recent exhibitions include Photography, Sequence, and Time (2012), Ten Years Gone (2015), and Something in the Way: A Brief History of Photography and Obstruction (2016–17). Much of his research focuses on the relationships between photography and other visual media.